"How large of a file could one resonably store in 1984 anyway? "
Well that Mac that Steve pulled out of the bag had a 400 kilobyte floppy disc in it. That was a lot of storage for a personal computer back then. Now, if you had two floppies for a staggering 800 kilobytes, you were cooking with gasoline. In 1984, I was using a tape recorder connected to my TRS-80 Color Computer. A floppy drive was expensive, advanced technology. hehe
I think they were talking about the backplane connector on the HDD itself not the number of pins on a single cable. There can be four FC cables connected to a single FC-AL drive (an in and an out for both loops). This includes pins for the power, ground, all the FC-AL pins for two complete loops, and a serial interface for backplane management.
"Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century", John R. Huizenga, 1992, Oxford University Press
Covers the original P&F incident. It's not up to date on the current happenings in the "field". Obvious from the title that Huizenga's not a believer.
Re:According the CF guys it's not the neutrons
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'm not a physicist but here goes:
There are three D + D reactions:
D + d -> excited 4He -> { products }
where the { products} are one of the following:
3He + n
T + p
4He + gamma
The gamma producing reaction is several orders of magnitude less likely than the first two. I don't believe the branching ratio has anything to do with which "phase" a material is in; it has to do with the excited Helium's decay. I believe the delay event should be independent of the fusion event so it should not differ depending on how the fusion was accomplished.
P & F originally claimed to have detected neutrons.
No, SCSI is not wrapped in IP packets in FC-AL. FC can support SCSI or IP but they need not have anything to do with each other.
Basically, when they say they are doing "SCSI" on FC-AL, all it really means is that the commands, mode pages, and errors have the same format as good-old parallel SCSI. All of the SCSI-2 physical/transport protocol crap (disconnect, reconnect, transfer rate, synchronous, asynchronous) is gone, replaced by the FC-AL physical/transport layers.
Personally, I wouldn't do these without a backplane. Manually cabling up both loops (FC-AL drives have two, redundant loop interfaces, four cables per drive!) is a pain in the arse.
From the broadcaster's point of view that's exactly what HDTV was. Way back in the 80's there was a push for "land mobile" uses (ambulances and fire trucks, for example) to get some needed spectrum from all those unused UHF channels. The broadcasters, to counter this threat, supported HDTV because it was kind of a neet-o gizmo that (1) sucked up tons of bandwith, or at least people thought it would back then, and (2) was far enough into the future that they wouldn't have to spend much money on it. So they started lobbying congress. It backfired, from their point of view, since Congress jumped on the bandwagon. So, with the threat to their bandwidth eliminated, the broadcasters did a 180 and mounted a defense against actually having to deploy it.
Check out "Defining Vision" by uhm somebody. Fascinating story.
I would love to bike to work. It would be great exercise and all that. There's just one problem...
On the roads I would have to travel on, I would be safer building a catapult, strapping on a helmet, and attempting to fling myself to work. With all the cars and trucks wizzing by at 60 mph and no bike lanes, my life expectancy would be measured in minutes.
If they installed some safe walkways and/or bikeways, paralleling major roads, I'm sure many more people would pedal around.
Comparing various computers only by the MHz of their processors is like comparing cars only by the RPMs of their engines.
By such a comparison, a little car with a teensy, high-revving four-banger would obviously be better for pulling a boat than a pitifully underpowered (in RPMs) V8 turbo diesel. Emphatically Not.
It's so ridiculous, so why do we continue to do it where computers are concerned?
Not a problem, though provided one can change the state of a single cell quickly enough, thanks to the slow response of human eyes. Considering the nature of the cell they described, I imagine one could change it very rapidly. At least on the order of microseconds, maybe nanoseconds.
Anyway, suppose you could update each cell 6 times for each screen refresh: R=red, G=green, B=blue, X = black
XX,XX,XX = black
RX,BX,GX = grey
RR,BB,GG = white
RX,XX,XX = dark red
RR,XX,XX = bright red,
etc...
So, one could easily get a 9-color, 100 Hz display if the cells can switch in 1.6 msec.
I bet one could build a 24-bit equivalent display if they can get the switching speed down to 100 usec or so.
The cost is not completely due to SCSI interface. There are several reasons.
1) Lower volumes. All things being equal, the more you build of something the cheaper will be its per unit price.
2) mechanicals used in SCSI drive != IDE. This has nothing to do with the interface. It has to do with the customer base. People running workstations and servers are willing to pay for better reliability, wider environmental tolerance, higher shock/vibration tolerances, higher RPMs, etc. All of that requires better (and more expensive) mechanical components and more stringent testing.
3) The electronics, aside from the interface itself, are better. Faster read-channel, larger buffer, more buffer bandwidth, faster servo processor for better actuator performance, faster microcontroller for smarter/better/richer interface, more flash to hold the firmware to implement all of these features, etc.
In short, the price is higher because there's more value. The typical user likely has no use for many of these features and would be better off buying the skankiest, cheepo drive they can find. As always, you get what you pay for.
I think you missed on of the most important points of the whole story. The Ring was incredibly dangerous, especially to the powerful. Gandalf spoke specifically of this issue at the beginning of "Fellowship" when Bilbo offerred him the Ring. The Ring basically drove Saruman and Boromir, two powerful characters, mad with desire for it and its power. If either had obtained it they would have either become slaves to Sauron, who would have thus reaquired his ring, or possibly overthrew him only to take his place. It took a humble, determined Hobbit to do the deed, and even he succumbed to the Ring at the end. Lucky thing Gollumn was there...
I think the Hobbit may be for kids, but LOTR has depth.
W. Alex Gabbard, a nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory, did a little calculating. According to the Environmental Protection Agency figures, an average ton of coal contains 1.3 parts per million uranium and 3.2 parts per million of thorium. Both naturally occurring trace metals are radioactive. Of the uranium, roughly 0.71 percent is U-235, the fissionable variety used by nuclear power plants.
Thus in 1982, he estimates, U.S. coal burring power plants, which collectively consumed 616 million tons of coal, released 801 tons of uranium and 1,971 tons of thorium into the environment - virtually unnoticed.
Roughly 11,371 pounds of the uranium was U-235.
Moreover, global combustion of 2,800 million tons of coal that year released 8,960 tons of thorium and 3,640 tons of uranium, of which 51,700 pounds was U-235.
Ironically, in 1982, 111 U.S. nuclear power plants used 540 tons of nuclear fuel to generate electricity. Thus, "the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels," Gabbard notes in the fall issue of the OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY REVIEW.
When I picture this, I get a vision of a bug in the embedded system, controlling the servos, ripping ones arms and legs from their sockets. Ouch. I think I will let someone else beta-test this contraption.
>>> But tell me, if instead of investing in space waiting for "direct or indirect returns", you invest directly in Earth technologies, what would you have achieved?
I think I would agree that direct investment would make much more sense when the goal is clear. Say the goal is: "make a lighter/stronger thingy". Funding a project focused to that end could be more efficient then funding a manned Mars mission and hoping a better thingy gets developed along the way.
But, I think the real benefit from things like the space program are the unexpected solutions to problems. (You didn't even know you could use a stronger/lighter thingy to make better doo-hickeys until you had to develop the thingy for the Mars mission...) I think any time we challenge ourselves to solve difficult problems, we benefit. We don't always benefit in a predictable way, though. If we could predict such things we would have used the direct approach in the first place.
So, both are needed. We need to use the direct approach when we can but we should not ignore the potential of serendipity; we should keep challenging ourselves.
Having said that, I don't see much challenge or much potential for unexpected benefits in the current projects such as the shuttle and the space station. We're basically squandering billions of dollars to get to the most boring place in the solar system: low earth orbit. And we're doing it with old technology. The only challenge here is to keep from losing funding from congress each year.
>>> these processors couldn't effectively be sped up beyond 100MHz, because of the amount of register-memory operations, unlike the x86 load into accumulator then do operation system, which has proven itself to be much more scalable
I don't think the issue was the architecture, it's just that companies were much more willing to support the enormous development efforts to extend the x86 than they were for the 68K. The techniques used in the Athlon to convert nasty x86 instructions into cleaner instructions for its RISC core could, theoretically, be applied to the 68K or any other ISA.
To my mind it's not the "supervision" that's exciting. It's that this gadget can actively compensate for defects in the eye. It sounds like it could deal with irregular astigmatism (perhaps caused by a botched laser surgery). At the moment, folks with irregular astigmatism are screwed. (I'm not talking about regular astigmatism which can be treated quite easily.) Adaptive optics could give these people normal vision.
The article says they are exploiting electrical behavior of the phase-change material, not it's optical properties so I don't think it's terribly applicable to holography.
I'm wondering just how big a deal the gyroscopic effects really are, fromt he point of view of the driver.
Consider that most cars have already have several big, massive spinning thingies in them already: four wheels/tires and the engine itself. I know the engine and wheels don't spin anything like 100,000 RPM but the engine, at least, sounds more massive.
My take is that the danger is not so much that the flywheel's gyro effects will fling your car off the road. Rather, one's wild maneuvers during rush-hour traffic could exceed the limit of the wheel's bearings. (They even mentioned in the article that pot-holes are bad news since they can inflict 5G impacts...)
My understanding was it had to do with the speed of the valve actuators (the electro-hydraulic thingies). Fast enough for your typical, low RPM diesel engine. Too slow for a gasoline engine with it's typiclaly higher RPM.
Theoretically, electronically controlled valves would be an advantage for either type of engine. Right now, its closer to begin feasible in diesel engines.
I hear that electric cars (or hybrids) can use the back-EMF from the drive motor(s) to assist the primary brakes. They still have regular brakes, though.
Perhaps because your average internal combustion engine doesn't have to be any where close to as precise as a hard drive.
The hard drive has to control the RPM to within a tiny fraction of a percent. It has a head flying mere microinches from the surface of the platter. It has to position that head over tracks that are spaced tens-of-thousands of tracks per inch.
Re:People actually care about power consumption?
on
G4 vs. Athlon Review
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps because low power means one might feasibly use said chip in a laptop while that is not an option for its power-slurping brethren?
Slashdot Mirror
"How large of a file could one resonably store in 1984 anyway? "
Well that Mac that Steve pulled out of the bag had a 400 kilobyte floppy disc in it. That was a lot of storage for a personal computer back then. Now, if you had two floppies for a staggering 800 kilobytes, you were cooking with gasoline. In 1984, I was using a tape recorder connected to my TRS-80 Color Computer. A floppy drive was expensive, advanced technology. hehe
I think they were talking about the backplane connector on the HDD itself not the number of pins on a single cable. There can be four FC cables connected to a single FC-AL drive (an in and an out for both loops). This includes pins for the power, ground, all the FC-AL pins for two complete loops, and a serial interface for backplane management.
"Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century", John R. Huizenga, 1992, Oxford University Press
Covers the original P&F incident. It's not up to date on the current happenings in the "field". Obvious from the title that Huizenga's not a believer.
OK, I'm not a physicist but here goes:
There are three D + D reactions:
D + d -> excited 4He -> { products }
where the { products} are one of the following:
3He + n
T + p
4He + gamma
The gamma producing reaction is several orders of magnitude less likely than the first two. I don't believe the branching ratio has anything to do with which "phase" a material is in; it has to do with the excited Helium's decay. I believe the delay event should be independent of the fusion event so it should not differ depending on how the fusion was accomplished.
P & F originally claimed to have detected neutrons.
Despite the implication of fiber optics in the name "Fiber Channel", the transceivers in hard drives are electrical, requiring copper cabling.
CP
No, SCSI is not wrapped in IP packets in FC-AL. FC can support SCSI or IP but they need not have anything to do with each other.
Basically, when they say they are doing "SCSI" on FC-AL, all it really means is that the commands, mode pages, and errors have the same format as good-old parallel SCSI. All of the SCSI-2 physical/transport protocol crap (disconnect, reconnect, transfer rate, synchronous, asynchronous) is gone, replaced by the FC-AL physical/transport layers.
Personally, I wouldn't do these without a backplane. Manually cabling up both loops (FC-AL drives have two, redundant loop interfaces, four cables per drive!) is a pain in the arse.
CP
From the broadcaster's point of view that's exactly what HDTV was. Way back in the 80's there was a push for "land mobile" uses (ambulances and fire trucks, for example) to get some needed spectrum from all those unused UHF channels. The broadcasters, to counter this threat, supported HDTV because it was kind of a neet-o gizmo that (1) sucked up tons of bandwith, or at least people thought it would back then, and (2) was far enough into the future that they wouldn't have to spend much money on it. So they started lobbying congress. It backfired, from their point of view, since Congress jumped on the bandwagon. So, with the threat to their bandwidth eliminated, the broadcasters did a 180 and mounted a defense against actually having to deploy it.
Check out "Defining Vision" by uhm somebody. Fascinating story.
I would love to bike to work. It would be great exercise and all that. There's just one problem...
On the roads I would have to travel on, I would be safer building a catapult, strapping on a helmet, and attempting to fling myself to work. With all the cars and trucks wizzing by at 60 mph and no bike lanes, my life expectancy would be measured in minutes.
If they installed some safe walkways and/or bikeways, paralleling major roads, I'm sure many more people would pedal around.
CP
Comparing various computers only by the MHz of their processors is like comparing cars only by the RPMs of their engines.
By such a comparison, a little car with a teensy, high-revving four-banger would obviously be better for pulling a boat than a pitifully underpowered (in RPMs) V8 turbo diesel. Emphatically Not.
It's so ridiculous, so why do we continue to do it where computers are concerned?
Doubt one could profit by moving people. Maybe some cargo, kinda marginal, though.
My best bet would be an oil pipeline.
Blah. Meant ~10 usec, not 100 usec.
Actually, it would only be a four-color display :)
Not a problem, though provided one can change the state of a single cell quickly enough, thanks to the slow response of human eyes. Considering the nature of the cell they described, I imagine one could change it very rapidly. At least on the order of microseconds, maybe nanoseconds.
Anyway, suppose you could update each cell 6 times for each screen refresh: R=red, G=green, B=blue, X = black
XX,XX,XX = black
RX,BX,GX = grey
RR,BB,GG = white
RX,XX,XX = dark red
RR,XX,XX = bright red,
etc...
So, one could easily get a 9-color, 100 Hz display if the cells can switch in 1.6 msec.
I bet one could build a 24-bit equivalent display if they can get the switching speed down to 100 usec or so.
CP
The cost is not completely due to SCSI interface. There are several reasons.
1) Lower volumes. All things being equal, the more you build of something the cheaper will be its per unit price.
2) mechanicals used in SCSI drive != IDE. This has nothing to do with the interface. It has to do with the customer base. People running workstations and servers are willing to pay for better reliability, wider environmental tolerance, higher shock/vibration tolerances, higher RPMs, etc. All of that requires better (and more expensive) mechanical components and more stringent testing.
3) The electronics, aside from the interface itself, are better. Faster read-channel, larger buffer, more buffer bandwidth, faster servo processor for better actuator performance, faster microcontroller for smarter/better/richer interface, more flash to hold the firmware to implement all of these features, etc.
In short, the price is higher because there's more value. The typical user likely has no use for many of these features and would be better off buying the skankiest, cheepo drive they can find. As always, you get what you pay for.
CP
I think you missed on of the most important points of the whole story. The Ring was incredibly dangerous, especially to the powerful. Gandalf spoke specifically of this issue at the beginning of "Fellowship" when Bilbo offerred him the Ring. The Ring basically drove Saruman and Boromir, two powerful characters, mad with desire for it and its power. If either had obtained it they would have either become slaves to Sauron, who would have thus reaquired his ring, or possibly overthrew him only to take his place. It took a humble, determined Hobbit to do the deed, and even he succumbed to the Ring at the end. Lucky thing Gollumn was there...
I think the Hobbit may be for kids, but LOTR has depth.
http://www.physics.isu.edu/~alber/coal.html
CP
When I picture this, I get a vision of a bug in the embedded system, controlling the servos, ripping ones arms and legs from their sockets. Ouch. I think I will let someone else beta-test this contraption.
Hehe, some of these name are already (sort of) used for asteroids...
(5871) Bobbell
(5642) Bobbywilliams
(2829) Bobhope
(2684) Douglas
(1884) Skip
(307) Nike
>>>
But tell me, if instead of investing in space waiting for "direct or indirect returns", you invest directly in Earth technologies, what would you have achieved?
I think I would agree that direct investment would make much more sense when the goal is clear. Say the goal is: "make a lighter/stronger thingy". Funding a project focused to that end could be more efficient then funding a manned Mars mission and hoping a better thingy gets developed along the way.
But, I think the real benefit from things like the space program are the unexpected solutions to problems. (You didn't even know you could use a stronger/lighter thingy to make better doo-hickeys until you had to develop the thingy for the Mars mission...) I think any time we challenge ourselves to solve difficult problems, we benefit. We don't always benefit in a predictable way, though. If we could predict such things we would have used the direct approach in the first place.
So, both are needed. We need to use the direct approach when we can but we should not ignore the potential of serendipity; we should keep challenging ourselves.
Having said that, I don't see much challenge or much potential for unexpected benefits in the current projects such as the shuttle and the space station. We're basically squandering billions of dollars to get to the most boring place in the solar system: low earth orbit. And we're doing it with old technology. The only challenge here is to keep from losing funding from congress each year.
>>>
these processors couldn't effectively be sped up beyond 100MHz, because of the amount of register-memory operations, unlike the x86 load into accumulator then do operation system, which has proven itself to be much more scalable
I don't think the issue was the architecture, it's just that companies were much more willing to support the enormous development efforts to extend the x86 than they were for the 68K. The techniques used in the Athlon to convert nasty x86 instructions into cleaner instructions for its RISC core could, theoretically, be applied to the 68K or any other ISA.
To my mind it's not the "supervision" that's exciting. It's that this gadget can actively compensate for defects in the eye. It sounds like it could deal with irregular astigmatism (perhaps caused by a botched laser surgery). At the moment, folks with irregular astigmatism are screwed. (I'm not talking about regular astigmatism which can be treated quite easily.) Adaptive optics could give these people normal vision.
The article says they are exploiting electrical behavior of the phase-change material, not it's optical properties so I don't think it's terribly applicable to holography.
I'm wondering just how big a deal the gyroscopic effects really are, fromt he point of view of the driver.
Consider that most cars have already have several big, massive spinning thingies in them already: four wheels/tires and the engine itself. I know the engine and wheels don't spin anything like 100,000 RPM but the engine, at least, sounds more massive.
My take is that the danger is not so much that the flywheel's gyro effects will fling your car off the road. Rather, one's wild maneuvers during rush-hour traffic could exceed the limit of the wheel's bearings. (They even mentioned in the article that pot-holes are bad news since they can inflict 5G impacts...)
My understanding was it had to do with the speed of the valve actuators (the electro-hydraulic thingies). Fast enough for your typical, low RPM diesel engine. Too slow for a gasoline engine with it's typiclaly higher RPM.
Theoretically, electronically controlled valves would be an advantage for either type of engine. Right now, its closer to begin feasible in diesel engines.
I hear that electric cars (or hybrids) can use the back-EMF from the drive motor(s) to assist the primary brakes. They still have regular brakes, though.
Perhaps because your average internal combustion engine doesn't have to be any where close to as precise as a hard drive.
The hard drive has to control the RPM to within a tiny fraction of a percent. It has a head flying mere microinches from the surface of the platter. It has to position that head over tracks that are spaced tens-of-thousands of tracks per inch.
Perhaps because low power means one might feasibly use said chip in a laptop while that is not an option for its power-slurping brethren?